The best tech gifts for your friends and family

5. Best Christmas gifts: £200-£499

Acer Aspire V5-571 - £450

Provided that you're not buying for a hardcore gamer, the Acer V5 is a great-value laptop. It looks more expensive than it is, and has a decent screen, keyboard and touchpad. It also performs better than you might expect at this price, thanks to a Core i5 processor and 6GB of RAM. The 500GB hard disk should be enough for most people, and there's a DVD writer and USB 3.0 support, too.

Humax YouView DTR-T1000 - £279

Humax makes great PVRs, with easy-to-use interfaces that make it simple to find programmes to watch and record. This box has a 500GB hard disk for around 200 hours of HD recording. Twin Freeview HD tuners allow you to record two shows at once, or watch a different show to the one you're recording. YouView lets you watch on-demand content from the past seven days.

Apple iPod touch - £249

The latest iPod touch is as impressive as its price tag. It borrows a few features from the iPhone 5, notably the 4in screen. It's impossibly thin at 6.1mm and has a 5Mp camera with an LED flash. The touch runs iOS 6, so you get great features such as Flyover maps and, for the first time on a touch, Siri. If you can't afford an iPhone 5, it's the next best thing.

Nikon D5100 - £450

A step up from Nikon's entry-level model, the D5100 is easy to use, yet produces stunning photos. It has a 16Mp sensor (the same used in the excellent D7000) and an impressive 11-point autofocus mechanism. On the rear is a 3in articulated LCD screen for reviewing images. The D5100 can also shoot full-HD video at 24- and 30fps, with full-time autofocus, even when using the LCD screen as a viewfinder.

GoPro HD Hero 2 - £299

This rugged, waterproof camera is available with a range of mounts, allowing you to attach it to almost anything. We like the vented helmet mount included with the Outdoor Edition, which lets you capture your downhill mountain-biking prowess, then send a clip of where it all went wrong to ‘You've Been Framed'.

Apple iPad - £399

There are many Android tablets to choose between, but the iPad remains king of the hill. The fourth-gen iPad benefits from a high-resolution Retina display and, with the latest version of Apple's iOS, the iPad gets the Siri voice assistant, too. The choice and quality of apps is second to none. It's also a fantastic playback device for video.